We warned you that one reason to hold off on boarding the Blu train is that movies released in the past year without sweet BD Live interactive features might be re-released. A lot of them. Today, we got first confirmation of this from Fox, which told us it’ll be re-releasing Alien Vs. Predator later this year with a suite of new interactive features. And that’s just the beginning.
To be fair, of all the Blu-ray studios, Fox is currently the most pumped about the interactive aspect—a big reason they helped build Blu along with Sony and friends. What Fox is adding doesn’t make this a crap double dip, either: It’s a multiplayer game woven into the film that you play as it progresses, attacking and killing other players in hopefully the most genuine film interaction to date. Not only do you upload your own avatar, it’ll stay in memory and reappear when you buy future AVP titles. Sven Davison, Fox’s VP of Worldwide Product Development and Production, said nothing he’s seen on HD DVD has come close to this.
Davison also said Fox was looking at three other major franchises for a heavy interactive component. But other studios probably aren’t going to be as scrupulous, because they primarily see interactivity as “icing on the cake” rather than potatoes to the 1080p-and-uncompressed-audio meat.
This of course opens the door for nearly everything already on BD to be double-dipped in the coming year—especially in cases like Warner’s, since that studio has already launched more interactive versions of movies on HD DVD while simultaneously putting out lower-featured editions on BD. Would this have happened if the 2.0 spec had been mandatory from the start?
Seeker
Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 10:52 AMNothing new here. This has been going on for years with DVD. There is about to be a new boxed set of Indiana Jones films released with a few new special features.
Double-dipping is here to stay, and it has nothing to do with blu-ray or profiles. It’s just corporate greed.
David D.
Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 4:44 PMIMO, it’s the double-dipping and region protection that encourages piracy. The disk should just have the movie and all the extras being optional downloads so as more stuff becomes available you can purchase it for some minor upgrade price not the full thing all over again. But then again, this is not in their interest as most of the extras are rubbish.